Customer Reviews

Enterprise Development Using Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 (Dv-Dlt Mastering)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Better than the mastering series on CD because it is in book format. Have no doubt, this is the same text. It is also the same text as the one week instructor lead class from Microsoft. It has very good coverage of MTS, and a good intro into COM. It will not get you past the test by itself, get the Exam Cram book also.

Overall, this book is a nice intro to Microsoft's MTS and COM using VB. The labs cover basic usage of MTS and VB with COM. The activities in the labs helped me remember what I learned. Points of knowledge are itemized nicely so you can spot them and mark them with your highlighter.

However, the book reads poorly at times. It is more readable than some classroom material from other courses I have taken (I bought this to read as a book and did not receive it in a class), but it does not have the appeal of a standalone book. For example, on pages 90 and 91 I see the phrase "In this exercise, you will create a new package called Math." repeated three times. Throughout the book you see this sort of repetition. You can skim large sections of the book due to this kind of filler and even larger sections if you don't do the labs. Though I think the labs help, this book is not a study guide. Rather it is a class experience in book form that offers little depth.

Also, this book seem preachy at times, letting me know the glories of Microsoft technology with little mention of alternatives. For example, self-check question 4 in Chapter One is "Select the statement that incorrectly describes a Microsoft Development tool." The answers are of course meant to hammer in that Microsoft's products are wonderful: Answer A is "Visual Basic is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool." So the point of this question is to help me remember how wonderful VB is? Many of the study questions were like this and did not help me test my knowledge much. And I would have appreciated some coverage of using Microsoft MTS and COM with the Oracle database, for example.

In conclusion, if you are very new to MTS, VB, and COM, get this book for quick exposure to the bare-basics with nice labs to bring home the knowledge. But if you already know the basics to these subject, you find yourself skimming large sections of the book and learning little.

This is a great reference for a beginner like me. If you want to learn fast, this book's for you. I've learn a lot from this book.You could find useful samples and usages of the ActiveX Data Objects, COM Components and the likes. You can even copy the codes and paste it in your application.

Don't bother to buy this book unless you are willing to invest at least one thousand dollars in incredibly expensive software. You are warned in the beginning that you can't do the lab exercises without this software. If you just want to read a book about three-tier development with Visual Basic there are certainly much better books than this one (such as Distributed COM by Maloney).